Customer Reviews

The End of the Story (High Risk Books)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is an astonishing novel. I have more or less given up writing reviews for Amazon, because (as Nicholson Baker points out) they don't seem to add to anything or create any kind of community, they just sink into the general accumulation of texts. (He was comparing Amazon with Wikipedia, where everyone's writing adds to something large.)

But I'm back again, writing for Amazon, because I think this novel needs to be remembered, and bought. There is a five-star review here that notes it's necessary to read the novel more than once. I think that is true, if you are expecting any sort of ordinary narrative. Davis has that rarest of all qualities: an original voice. She speaks plainly, in a minimalist style, and that is fairly conventional. But the use the makes of the minimalist voice (which I find myself mimicking in this review, inadvertently) is not at all usual. This is life with all its content subtracted away. The novel is about a love affair, but we are scarcely told anything about what either person looks like. We hear, in passing, that the narrator likes to identify species of grass and spiders, but we do not hear any names of grasses or spiders. She falls in love with a man, but we have no idea what kind of person he is. They are both attached to a university, but we hear next to nothing about what they study or teach. She is a translator of French, but there is no French in the book. (That is especially astonishing: think of other Francophiles, like Wallace Stevens.) Nothing has content, everything is told as her recollections of actions and places.

In this contentless, abstract world the writer's voice is all we have. We listen as she wonders whether her memories are correct, and admits that some art not. We hear her descriptions of her behavior, always written as if she were at some remove from them. When she is suffering most acutely from the absence of the man she fell in love with, we hear that she seems to see herself from a distance. That is the book's strangest moment. We have always seen her from a distance. What kind of narrator could construct a novel so impeccably abstracted from the proper names and the direct emotions of life, and then say that, in her memory, she was only abstracted in that way during a short period of grief?

The psychology of the book is absolutely without parallel. It is deeply sympathetic, sad, detached, and also, at the same time, entirely perverse and because of that perversity incomprehensible. The book is, in its own way, a masterpiece.

Lydia Davis has written a breath-taking book about how writing transforms both a writer and her subject. A wonderfully written study of how the process of creating a written record about her unlikely obsession with a younger man eventually freed her from it. I recommend this book to everyone I meet.

Lydia Davis introduces an intriguing and unique concept in this story that makes you think a little bit differently while reading other novels afterward. The concept of this novel, whereby the narrator plays back an experience of love with the context of knowledge and emotions after the fact, makes you wonder how differently you would feel during past experiences, had you known what you know now. While this concept has really stuck with me for many months after reading the book, I found the story itself and depth of characters a little light and forgettable.

This book has an inflectionless prose style, that takes a little patience at first, but after awhile begins to produce a hypnotic effect. By the end of the book I was in love with the prose style. Also, the parts about the writing of the novel, which are included within the novel itself, are hilarious.

Something I've gotten really into; the idea that a novel doesn't need a story. Lydia Davis asks the reader to engage her in a dialogue with the language, usage, tone and cadence of her writing.
This doesn't come as a shock; Davis' work has always been careful not to involve her audience in the kind of gratification employed by some of her colleagues in the hih-brow writing world. Take "Samuel Johnson..." a very deconstructive collection, more like a poetic undertaking than a collection. Unfortunately, her own personal indulgences shine through in this, her most recent book, and it is more of a paranoid meandering than a globular entity.
And, fortunately, her conservative embrace of the literary world, often seen through a jaundiced (French translator's) eye, is much more of a likeable read. It will remain acessible, so long as those who chose to take it on will exhibit the same amount of patience that Davis has in writing this book.

I love lydia davis. I love her surgical deconstruction of relationships, obsession and, for that matter, any and all matters of the heart. More people should buy this book and even if they don't lydia davis remains a god to us her loyal fans.

I started reading "The End Of The Story" as I read any other novel, but soon realized it needs... and deserves... more attention. And so when I finished the book, I went back and read the beginning again, to capture what I had missed.

Really, "The End Of The Story" is more than a novel, it is a glimpse inside an intelligent and complex person. An obsessed person, yes, but who among us has not been obsessed at one time or another?

It is one of the best books I've ever read.

"The End of the Story" is a novel about two things: one, a woman's love affair with a man thirteen years younger than her, and two, the difficulty in writing a novel about that love affair. Unfortunately, neither of these things turns out to be that interesting. Instead of simply writing a compelling and heart wrenching story about a December-May relationship, Davis chooses to concentrate on the process of writing the story, repeatedly pointing out that this event may or may not have actually happened as she is describing it.
For example, she describes a night in which she and her unnamed lover have a fight. Then two pages later she apologizes because the fight she described was actually two fights she conflated into one, thinking that would make the story more interesting. Almost every incident described is later re-described as it may or may not have happened, with the author continually apologizing for omitting details, or explaining what actually happened, or clarifying that the truth is too emotionally powerful to put in writing. Essentially, the power of the love affair is lost in the writing about the writing.
Frustrating and not engaging, "The End of the Story" is a high concept book that does not pay off.

This book is genius. Did someone else already say that? By putting aside plot, description, linear narrative, all the things we take for granted in a novel, Davis leaves us with experience so real it's as if it happened to us. The closest thing I've read to this is Alain Robbe-Grillet's "Jealousy," which I read many years ago and still haunts me. I'm afraid that everything I read after this is going to seem mannered and artificial.

I had to read this for a class on the modern novel, and it was by far the best thing I've been made to read in my undergraduate career. Davis' writing is crisp, clear, and poetic, and her themes are universal. It;s a beautiful little book about love and loss, and you definitely need to be in the right frame of mind. Since that class sophomore year of undergrad, I've read it five or six times.